Thursday I was posted on both BoingBoing and Mezzoblue for my project and today I saw that I was on Kottke.org as well, I really lucked out. To follow along with the project or if you want to help, please go to the site that Squarespace set up for me.
Thanks everyone for the support, Scott
A South Florida woman who died this week had an unusual last request. Instead of flower or contributions in her name to a charity, she asked those who loved her to try to make sure President George W. Bush is not re-elected.
Loved ones said that Joan Abbey was committed to her political passions, even in death.
Abbey was born in Montreal, but lived for many years in Miami Beach and Aventura. Family and friends came from as far away as Canada and California to remember Abbey at the Mount Nebo Jewish Cemetery in Miami.
Abbey, who was a lifelong Democrat, died Monday — coincidentally on the first day of the Democratic National Convention.
Her sister, Tillie Shapiro, said, “She was just a caring person She cared about people, and people who were disadvantaged.”
Abbey was buried the day after the Democratic convention ended. Her unusual death notice in the Miami Herald said: “You can honor Joan’s values by voting against George Bush and contributing to a liberal or Democratic cause.”
Abbey’s nephew, Martin Shapiro, said, “What she cared most about was improving circumstances in this country… getting rid of George Bush and making this a better country for all people.”…More
te last month, President Bush lost his greatest advantage in his bid for reelection. A poll conducted by ABC News and The Washington Post discovered that challenger John Kerry was running even with the president on the critical question of whom voters trust to handle the war on terrorism. Largely as a result of the deteriorating occupation of Iraq, Bush lost what was, in April, a seemingly prohibitive 21-point advantage on his signature issue. But, even as the president’s poll numbers were sliding, his administration was implementing a plan to insure the public’s confidence in his hunt for Al Qaeda.
This spring, the administration significantly increased its pressure on Pakistan to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, his deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri, or the Taliban’s Mullah Mohammed Omar, all of whom are believed to be hiding in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan. A succession of high-level American officials–from outgoing CIA Director George Tenet to Secretary of State Colin Powell to Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca to State Department counterterrorism chief Cofer Black to a top CIA South Asia official–have visited Pakistan in recent months to urge General Pervez Musharraf’s government to do more in the war on terrorism. In April, Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, publicly chided the Pakistanis for providing a “sanctuary” for Al Qaeda and Taliban forces crossing the Afghan border. “The problem has not been solved and needs to be solved, the sooner the better,” he said.
This public pressure would be appropriate, even laudable, had it not been accompanied by an unseemly private insistence that the Pakistanis deliver these high-value targets (HVTs) before Americans go to the polls in November. The Bush administration denies it has geared the war on terrorism to the electoral calendar. “Our attitude and actions have been the same since September 11 in terms of getting high-value targets off the street, and that doesn’t change because of an election,” says National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack. But The New Republic has learned that Pakistani security officials have been told they must produce HVTs by the election. According to one source in Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), “The Pakistani government is really desperate and wants to flush out bin Laden and his associates after the latest pressures from the U.S. administration to deliver before the [upcoming] U.S. elections.” Introducing target dates for Al Qaeda captures is a new twist in U.S.-Pakistani counterterrorism relations–according to a recently departed intelligence official, “no timetable[s]” were discussed in 2002 or 2003–but the November election is apparently bringing a new deadline pressure to the hunt. Another official, this one from the Pakistani Interior Ministry, which is responsible for internal security, explains, “The Musharraf government has a history of rescuing the Bush administration. They now want Musharraf to bail them out when they are facing hard times in the coming elections.” (These sources insisted on remaining anonymous. Under Pakistan’s Official Secrets Act, an official leaking information to the press can be imprisoned for up to ten years.)
A third source, an official who works under ISI’s director, Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq, informed tnr that the Pakistanis “have been told at every level that apprehension or killing of HVTs before [the] election is [an] absolute must.” What’s more, this source claims that Bush administration officials have told their Pakistani counterparts they have a date in mind for announcing this achievement: “The last ten days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad and during [ul-Haq's] meetings in Washington.” Says McCormack: “I’m aware of no such comment.” But according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that “it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July”–the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston…More
couple of years back, a potential client contacted me about improving her company’s website. It seemed like a good fit: the company was (and is) an established, profitable company; and improving the customer experience would, without a doubt, create significant gains in metrics like revenue and customer acquisition. The site needed help, customers were frustrated, but with a bit of work the business could enjoy enormous returns.
The problem came when we talked about fee. Creative Good was too expensive, she said, because her boss (the CEO) only wanted to spend a few tens of thousands of dollars per *year* on anything dealing with the customer experience.
I told her that seemed a tad low for an annual budget to be spent improving the site for customers, especially given that the annual revenue of the company was around $50 million.
“Well,” she responded, “we already spend $30 million a year just on advertising, so there’s not much left over.”
Needless to say, the project never happened. The CEO decided to continue to “run a few surveys” with his $20,000-or-so budget; his $30 million in ads continued to drive customers to a website that frustrated them.
Let’s review the numbers.
Amount Annual budget for…
$30,000,000…Advertising (driving people to the website)
$20,000…….Customer experience (what happens when they get there)
So… a good chunk of every dollar the company earned went to sending potential customers to have a bad experience. A tiny percentage of those frustrated people would muddle through and become paying customers; the vast majority would click away, never to return.
Is this any way to run a business?
Recently U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld attested to the revolutionary power of the wireless uploading of digital images to the Internet. Testifying in Congress about the sudden widespread appearance of photographs and video of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, he did not address this subject as a technological optimist. Rumsfeld is the farthest thing from a dotcom stock analyst circa 1999, or a computer visionary. Rather, he stuck to the brutal reality, explaining that the combination of cheap digital cameras and the Internet had fundamentally changed the dynamics of news making during wartime.
Today, everyone has access to the latest high quality consumer electronic devices. Every cell phone has the ability to capture images, even movies. Once people begin to use these devices to record the significant events in their lives, there is no way to prevent them from slipping cameras into any location. When sensitive material is captured in digital form, it takes on a life of its own. Circulating across the Internet, it becomes a fact in itself. It is impossible for a military organization to control the flow of disbursed, distributed content production in a network environment.
The mainstream media, even if they prefer to ignore troubling facts, are forced to respond. The story of torture at Abu Ghraib prison had been available to journalists for more than three months before the first disturbing photographs surfaced. The media could have reported on it at any time. But with images, it was established as a fact that could not be avoided.
Rumsfeld and his colleagues better prepare themselves, because this is just a taste of the emerging media ecology that is now on the horizon.
We are not far from the day when all the technological pieces discussed above can be put together into a stand alone, easy to use, hardware unit that can be plugged into a set top box or game console that is connected to the Internet. Such a device would include hardware MPEG encoding, P2P BitTorrent technology, and a user friendly interface. It would allow you to play the videos you downloaded from the Internet on your television screen. It would also have a “video in” plug for a digital camera, and a start/stop button. Simply by plugging the camera in, you could become a video producer. After recording a video piece, your clip could upload automatically to your blog using BitTorrent distribution. This would allow other viewers to play clips over the Internet of you and other participants in your DVGuide-like network, through a box that is connected to your TV set.
Friday’s Fantasy Future Gadget has a very simple premise: we’ll give you one of the best ideas ever conceived for free. You have to buy us a jet plane when you make a million dollars with it, though. Today’s gadget would sell, like, eight nine eleven millions or thousands millions in a week, guaranteed.
The premise is simple. Someone needs to purchase the rights to use the image of Soundwave, the evil Decepticon Transformer, from Hasbro. Then make a hard disk-based MP3 player out of Soundwave (slightly smaller than the original Transformer toy, though, for portability) that actually transforms. Then sell the individual transforming cassette Transformers (Casseticons, was it?) as individual USB flash-based MP3 players that can be placed inside the larger Soundwave unit to extend its library.
There you go. I mean, if we have these tiny flash MP3 players, why don’t we do something fun with them instead of just making them smaller? The hipster-set (and the dork-set, of which I am a dice-carrying member) would eat it up. (Thanks, asymptotic, for the original idea!)
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